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The idea that manuals in linux are a good way to learn and understand new software is peak linux neckbeard bs, and I will die on this hill. I congratulate OP on the exact type of autism that lets them feel this is an effective and useful method for learning new software, but if there is desire to have a greater adoption of linux maybe its bad to be snarky at folks for not instantly understand the terminal based documentation conventions of some dudes in the 70s. Maybe an alphabetical* list of all possible options is okay for referencing or searching, but is objectively insane way to learn or understand a problem.
For appliances at least, 95% of “the manual” today is useless CYA safety disclosures in 17 different languages. Manuals today rarely contain useful information.
The actual manual is usually hidden somewhere on it for repair techs to find. For my oven it was taped on the back.
Until you do like step one of taking an appliance apart, and realize that the real manual is marked “for technician use only”, and it’s hidden inside of the appliance.
My washer and dryer both have good manuals complete with circuit diagrams under the top once i take a few screws out. My chest freezer has one taped up under the hatch where the compresser sits. My refrigerator has one hidden in the door hinge.
That or Google “<model> service manual”
Yeah, my parents were about to throw out an oven that would keep shutting off. I pull it away from the wall and boom, wiring diagram. Take out the ohm meter, figure out that the resistance across the temperature probe went to near zero when steam intruded through a gap in the crimp. 5 dollar part and it was good to go for years to come (the new part was crimped in a simpler, more robust way).
Dishwasher had the service manual taped to the kick plate. It gave me codes to troubleshoot, finding the heating element died.
Yup, just got done wiring up an old washer to turn it into a feather plucker using the technician only manual!
Appliance repair in the 20’s? WTFY (Watch the fucking Youtube)
query:samsung Ice maker stoped working
Hi, I’m jimmy from shadyApplianceParts.com Did your samsung ice box stop making ice? That’s a common problem. What you need to…
Honestly I have to disagree. All my recently purchased appliances: microwave, washing machine, dishwasher and induction cooktop, had detailed instruction manuals that were genuinely useful, especially where the finer details aren’t obvious from the device itself.
Heck, even my wireless earbuds had a little bit of useful info, like how to force them into pairing mode.
Of course, all those manuals contained those nonsense safety warnings too (and I read every word of course! :P) but that’s neither here nor there.
The troubleshooting section of the manual is almost always useless because it only ever covers user error.
My washer threw a drainage error and the manual suggested I blocked the outlet or had done something daft. I looked up the error code online and 90% of the time it was a failed water pump.
I had to replace the water pump. It was an easy job that required less documentation than a lego set for a 5 year old. You just had to know which screws to loosen to get to the pump. Was it documented? Of course not.
And software doesn’t even come with those kinds of manuals anymore.
Meanwhile I’m sitting here with my ADHD brain that is unable to read the first two sentences of a manual without losing focus and thinking about 15 other things and marveling at those can actually get through something like that and have it stick in their brain longer than 5 minutes.
The trick with my ADHD brain is to refer to documentation when I’m hyperfocused on how the thing works for some reason. It doesn’t have to be because it’s broken, but it could be, lol.
I’ll read the manual after it stops working. There are 10 pages of “warning: don’t microwave your cat” and 10 pages of what obvious buttons do and if I’m lucky 3 pages of fault codes that in the worst case scenario I’ll see one of them the next 10 years.
Sometimes customers pay me to troubleshoot what other vendors sold them, I find the manual for their model number and basically flick through it until I find something.
Hey someone that reads the manual. As someone who makes manuals that makes me happy.
Blew the technicians mind away because I read the bad manual
Blew the technician
Oh, so you’re þe guy I need to ask when I have any small problem and I’m too lazy to… RTFM.
RÞFM
ftfy
Oh, snap
RTFM is an obnoxious retort for people, arguably in community, not to engage with a member of the community. I don’t mind reading the manual, but perhaps you can point me to where in the manual I could get further insight.
Reading a manual is also a skill. Being able to compartmentalize manual info into buckets of “obvious and I don’t need to read on”, “could be helpful”, “interesting, but it gets there I ain’t touching it” takes either training or just getting lucky after a certain number of reps.
This is the only comment I’ve seen in here that I’ve seen address this. The whole concept of RTFM is reactionary and ridiculous. That kind of thinking and behavior kept me at arm’s length from the Linux/tech community for many years. Still kinda does.
Writing a manual is also a skill so starting with good ones help a lot.
RTFM is an obnoxious retort for people, arguably in community, not to engage with a member of the community.
I think there’s a low level of “How do I figure this out?” [generic] in which its good advice to ask “Does it say anything about this in the manual?” before you try and tear into a system as a third party giving advice.
I also think “I read the manual on my refrigerator” is some “I dare you to prove me wrong” horseshit. On the one hand, people don’t do this for a reason. Refrigerators simply aren’t that complicated to use. And the manual is rarely a smooth read, even for professionals. So its good advice, but not practical advice, better than half the time.
Reading a manual is also a skill. Being able to compartmentalize manual info into buckets of “obvious and I don’t need to read on”, “could be helpful”, “interesting, but it gets there I ain’t touching it” takes either training or just getting lucky after a certain number of reps.
Also, just a matter of free time and mental calories to burn. And hey, maybe if you’re a hobbyist who is hip deep in your Linux kernel because you eat this shit up, its the place you should have started. But also, Jesus Christ, maybe I just want a Mint instance to run a Jellyfin server. I’m not trying to get my master’s degree in this shit.
Part of the fun of buying a game was getting to RTFM on the way home.
public transit, ftw… unless “I wish I died pecefully like my grandfather… the driver who was RTFMing, instead of his screaming passengers”
Last time I could buy a game with an instruction manual I was lucky that I could ride in a car without a car seat.
I don’t bother with manuals any more. I never manage to retain much information unless I need it right now. Way easier to just fumble along and find what I need when I need it and cobble together a half-baked “understanding”.
Should go get some ADHD meds one day.
I work in maintenance, people act like I’m doing magic, but 90% of the time all I’ve done is read the fucking manual, the other 10% is just basic awareness.
Its fucking impossible to get new kids to read the manual. They just resort to asking others for stuff they could look up. When I was new I asked the old timers as a last resort. Not because they’d be mean about it, but because I know I wouldn’t learn as well just being handed information.
It’s literally all this, all the way down until the turtles.
Holds manual
Squints
Turtles🦋 is this… Turtle Power?
Does reading medicine books count too? Since we’re all driving human bodies 24/7? Or is it just turtles down to the bottom of the tech layer.
Wasn’t it just one turtle down there?
Nah, it’s turtles all the way down.
Yeah, this sure resonates with me. When I started with Linux to set up anything you had to RTFM. I remember constantly reading some “Linux printing How-To” or “Linux Wi-Fi How-To”. It definitely stayed with me. If I buy something and it has a manual I’m reading it. Just in case.
I once read the first 3 chapters of the Git book and my coworkers think I’m some kind of Git wizard
One of the first things I did at my first full time job (while my very under prepared boss was looking for “junior-dev-friendly” tasks for me to work) was go to git-scm.com and just read through all the man pages I could. I spent a few days doing that, then my boss asked me to create a PowerPoint and present what I learned to the team. It was instantly apparent that I was the only one who knew anything beyond
git commit -aon the team at that point, and I was promptly appointed the “title” of “source control SME”. I’ve been heading up version control best practices for every team I’ve been on since (which is scary because the git cli has changed quite a bit since I read all those man pages but I haven’t had a chance to go back and refresh my knowledge).Do you have a blog or something? Do you write about your experiences regarding this?
These days I just ask llm to fork me a branch and whatever else I need :p
Literally same 💀
My folks bought a new EV recently and my dad was unable to figure anything out for days. I hopped in and was doing everything he wanted in minutes.
“How the hell did you do all that‽”
“I RTFM Dad”
“Reading! Kids, nowadays (sigh).”
Most people don’t even read the error messages. They’re never gonna read a whole manual.
And because people don’t read error messages, many applications/sites/etc don’t even put them, or if they do they either don’t have any public facing documentation to actually figure out what that code means, or they do and it might as well be nothing
They don’t.
Undoing self-owns like ignoring available information is the basis for 40% of the economy.
Most people were conditioned by more “user-friendly” systems to ignore the content of error messages because only an expert can make sense of “Error: 0x8000000F Unknown Error”. So they don’t even try, and that’s how they put themselves in a
Yes, do as I say!situation.It’s not even obscure, context dependent errors. I’ve had many professional system administrators not understand what “connection was closed by peer” meant.
Well, to be fair, I’m also not very well versed in the intricacies of connecting with British nobility.
One day I’ll catch that jerk Peer! So rude, always closing my connections!
It’s very much on brand for Peer, at least in the beginning of the play https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_Gynt
More than once I had trouble calls about an “error message” that basically said “everything is fine, click ok to proceed”
But most error messages are in plain English first (plus some numbers and codes).
No, they see white (gray actually) blocky text on a black background, they think the machine is broken and go into panic mode. Instead of reading.
Which is kinda what you said.
People who don’t read error messages or do not take the time to see what is going on and just come to the technician/mechanic/doctor saying “it doesn’t work” or some half-assed hypothesis piss me off so bad.
I know that at some point we all do a little of this in our lifes, but some people don’t seem to be able to read one goddamn paragraph ever.
At this point, if a student brings in a laptop, explains what doesn’t work, and leaves me to diagnose and fix it, I consider it a good report because it means that the student didn’t get any overconfident ideas. If a student also explains what they were doing when a thing failed, I’m giving them preferential treatment.
Then there are comp-sci students who attempted something. I had one who disassembled their laptop and tore a ribbon cable. I had one who plugged in a random mis-matched RAM stick that turned out to be busted and wondered why Windows kept crashing. I had one who completely fucked up the registry. I had one who wanted to install Ubuntu for dual booting and accidentally wiped the entire SSD.
I would rather spend an hour babysitting their computers than an entire afternoon un-fucking something they thought they could handle. If it were up to me, I would restrict the crap out of their user accounts, but the faculty leaders insist, against empirical evidence, that they’re smart enough.
Are these laptops provided by the faculty?
In any case I do not mind so much the “I should try to fix this on my own first”. If it’s your own device and accept the risks/consequences. But if it is a work/university provided laptop then it makes no sense to attempt to fix it on one’s own.
I can feel your pain trying to fix/repair something you have to figure out what kind of stupid stuff was done to the device.
but some people don’t seem to be able to read one goddamn paragraph ever.
I had a problem with my car. It felt strange while driving. Made some unusual noise. Then a bit later the motor warning light came on.
I went to the garage, told them about the warning light and what I noticed the time before, what I suspected and such. A short while after the mechanic came to me and asked for a few details, as my description “wasn’t helpful” and the repair would be much faster with more details that told them where to look etc. Turns out the guy who checked in my car only noted “a warning light is on” and nothing else of my ramblings.
So sometimes it’s also paying attention to what might be important and relaying information.
ah well, then that is them being stubborn and being unable to troubleshoot.
To be fair, techs don’t usually talk to the people who can read, so they’re only ever going to see idiots. There are competent people in the world, they’ll just never need your help, so you don’t see them.
Last time I called tech support, it was for a Dell, and I interrupted their speech to tell them I already looked up the diagnostic. They asked which numbers were lit on the error panel to confirm I had the right diagnostic, and passed me directly to who I needed to talk to. I only called tech support because the cpu socket died and I was putting in a warranty claim, otherwise they would have never even heard from me because I could just install a new motherboard myself.
edit: speeling
They’ll refuse to attempt to understand the problem then get mad when they get ripped off.
What about the fucking manual?
Kama Sutra?
I guess you get good at Unix and refrigerator by reading it, so why not?
Don’t fuck the manual!
It’s Read The Fucking Manual not Fuck The Reading Manual
